Sotheby’s will offer Magnum Opus: A Private Collection of Exceptional Art and Objects Through the Ages, a single-owner collection of more than 900 works spanning millennia and continents, from Roman imperial marble, Old Master paintings and ancient Near Eastern ceramics to Islamic court carpets, royal French furniture, Impressionist masterworks and 20th century design. Assembled over decades by one collector, it includes a cuirassed marble torso of a Roman emperor, Richard Avedon’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, four Savonnerie carpets commissioned by Louis XIV for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, furniture that once belonged to Marie-Antoinette, and works by Canaletto, Rodin and Picasso.
A public exhibition will open at Sotheby’s headquarters at the Breuer in New York, on view across four floors from 16 to 23 October 2026. Highlights will then be offered across a series of four single-owner sales in New York, together comprising more than 600 works and estimated to realise in excess of $60 million. The series opens with the Magnum Opus Evening Auction, followed by three thematic day sales: Act II: Figure & Form, Act III: Darkness & Light and Act IV: Ornament & Texture. Further works will continue to appear across 22 additional sales at Sotheby’s New York and Paris, spanning Contemporary and Modern Art, Books and Manuscripts, Jewelry, Prints and Photographs, and Design, well into 2027.
At the heart of the collection is a marble torso of a Roman emperor, Julio-Claudian period, first half of the 1st century A.D. (estimate: $8 million to 12 million), described as the most important Roman Imperial sculpture to come to auction in over a decade and the only known example outside an institutional collection, with a publication history beginning in 1926. Probably representing Augustus, Tiberius or Claudius, it is joined by an Augustan marble portrait head of a girl, 27 B.C. to A.D. 14 (estimate: $2.5 million to 3.5 million), an idealised image after Livia that was part of the von Schwarzenberg Collection and, before that, the collection of Sir D’ Arcy Osborne, the 12th Duke of Leeds.
The Old Master paintings are anchored by Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto’s Venice, a View of the Grand Canal Looking East with Santa Maria della Salute (estimate: $6 million to 8 million), painted circa 1740 and previously in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Luis Meléndez’s Oranges, Nuts, Spices, Boxes of Sweetmeats, a Jug and a Cask on a Table (estimate: $4 million to 6 million) held the world auction record for the artist from its 2012 sale until last year, when his Still Life with a Cauliflower achieved $6.2 million at Sotheby’s.
Also offered are Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem from the Northwest (estimate: $2.5 million to 3.5 million), Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Head of an Old Man (estimate: $1 million to 1.5 million), and Francesco Guardi’s View of the south bank of the Grand Canal, with Ca’ Pesaro (estimate: $1 million to 1.5 million), described as the finest drawing by the artist remaining in private hands. Two sheets by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo from his Punchinello series are estimated at $200,000 to 300,000 and $400,000 to 600,000.
Among the Impressionist and Modern works, Edgar Degas’s pastel Danseuse rajustant son chausson (estimate: $5 million to 7 million) stands among the most accomplished of his ballet studies. Max Ernst’s bronze Jeune homme au coeur battant (estimate: $1 million to 1.5 million), conceived in 1944 on Long Island with Dorothea Tanning, was cast from molds fashioned from a cylindrical bucket, a metal box, the pans of a scale and a spoon.
(Press Release)
